Immortal Spirit
Directed by Alan Lo
Year: 1999
Rating: 4.0
Well, that was even worse than I expected. Watching a Hong Kong ghost story
from this period is at best a 50-50 proposition that it will be any good.
Low budgets, poorly written scripts, lousy special effects and acting that
would get you kicked out of acting class generally condemn these films to
mediocrity. For some reason that I can't quite recall I was expecting better
here. I guess Almen Wong as a revengeful ghost held promise for me. I am a
fan of hers from Her Name is Cat back in 1998 when she and Michael Wong teamed
up for a decent action film. They are back together here again and they clearly
should have stuck to action. Almen had a disappointing career after Cat -
it looked like she might be the next big thing in Girls with Guns, but it
never panned out. Instead she showed up in a few horror films, a couple dramas
and the dreadfully cheap Her Name is Cat 2 and then basically retired to
become a fitness guru (I actually have her Keep Fit video much to my shame).
This one drags along like a wounded cat taking forever to get anywhere.
And when it finally gets there and when you finally think there is going
to be a payoff for your patience it just kind of flutters away in a totally
confusing ending. Super Li (Tony Ho) is out getting soused one evening drinking
by himself in a bar and on his way home he stops to throw up and makes the
acquaintance of a ghost (Almen Wong) who is in need of a good body to possess.
She has been a wandering ghost for seven years which I think in Ghost Years
feels like a lot more. She wants revenge on Mike (Michael Wong) for having
wronged her. We don't find out what he did until the very end but we get
lots of flashbacks of them having body to body contact. She looked damn fine
when she was alive but dead not so much. She looks a bit like Rowan Atkinson
as Blackadder but even with a pastier complexion.
Super Li now possessed by the ghost starts to harass the wife (Christine
Ng) and child of Mike, who is also a cop. Of course no one knows he is possessed,
they just think he is crazy but everyone acts like an idiot as the wife thinks
Mike is having a sexual affair with a man and Mike can't act his way out of
it - he is after all Michael Wong. They thankfully bring on Helen Law Lan
late in the film and she adds whatever spark the film has as the mother of
Mike who also happens to know her way around ghosts - as all mothers need
to in Hong Kong - it comes in a manual along with how to Breast Feed your
baby.
